Main menu

Behind the Brexit Firewall, HS2 has been Trundling on at Panic Stations with Increased Costs, Incompetence, Spin and Fraud.

With the Brexit Firewall incinerating almost everything else that has the audacity to try and become news, you might be forgiven for not having noticed the much-maligned HS2 continuing to lurch from one disaster to another this year. Whilst there have been a few column inches about HS2 from stalwart journalists and the trade press, it’s only now that the level of ineptitude, deceit and subsequent the buck-passing at Crossrail has come to the fore, that HS2 is once again getting the chance to shine like the polished turd that it is.

Morgan decided that neither he nor the bad news would be buried so easily this time. Starting pantomime season early, he went onto Radio 4 to respond to the speculation he was about to be sacked with “Oh yes, I will!”, prompting retorts of “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly comment!” and eventually, “Oh yes, he has!”.

For Chris Grayling, it was an important distinction that when Morgan did go he ‘resigned’, because having to sack someone who he’d hailed as ‘world class’ when he gave him the job just five months earlier, would only reaffirm everything everyone already knew about the total incompetence of the Transport Secretary. The reason for this ‘sacking by mutual consent’ is simple; Morgan said he would keep HS2 on time and on budget, just before he was made to carry the can for the last-minute admission that Crossrail is very late and quite a bit over budget, something which must have been clear for a very long while beforehand.

Replacing Morgan at HS2 is Allan Cook, who formerly sat in the boardroom of HS2 contractors Marshalls and WS Atkins, whilst Andrew Wolstenholme, the Crossrail CEO who clearly saw none of this mess coming got a £160,000 bonus this year as well as a £97,734 pay off for ‘loss of employment’ when he moved to the obligatory job at HS2 Ltd, all on top of over half a million in basic wages. All of this is typical of the revolving-door-jobs-for-the-boys practice at HS2 Ltd that has seen an army of overpaid staff and consultants running their own gravy train for almost a decade, which previously saw Sir David Higgins become Chair of HS2 Ltd just before anyone noticed the mess he’d left at Network Rail.

It should be patently obvious to any politician with half an ounce of sense that Terry Morgan is not the problem, he’s not even a convincing scapegoat. Having these sorts of vested interest at the core of HS2, coupled with politicians showing a casual disinterest in providing genuine scrutiny is the reason why HS2 is a mess that never should have got this far.

When it was pointed out that HS2 is clearly at least three years behind the timescales presented to Parliament, the categorical response from HS2 Ltd was that it was; “wrong and misleading” to claim the HS2 Phase 1 Construction Timetable specified on the HS2 Ltd website is, or was ever, the Phase 1 construction timetable. Undeterred, HS2 Ltd doubled down claiming the project“remains on track with construction works well underway on 60 sites across the route from London to Birmingham”, before launching a national PR drive to demonstrate those 60 sites are actually archaeological digs.

This is symptomatic of how random and inconsistent the increasingly desperate messaging concerning HS2 has become. In the past HS2 Ltd have displayed a composed serenity as they’ve banged out standard rebuttals to any criticism, but the mandarins are getting increasingly jumpy and their responses decidedly techy as they are dragged out from behind the Brexit Firewall, back into the spotlight they should never have left.

By the time another ‘behind schedule and over-budget’ story came along, HS2 Ltd responded with a veritably grumpy “We don’t keep a runningcommentary on what is the country’s biggest and most demanding infrastructure project”, demonstrating a siege mentality, the opposite of what you’d hope for from ‘the country’s biggest and most demanding infrastructure project’. That story was that £6.6bn of contracts, which were already known to be over-budget and late because HS2 Ltd hadn’t done ground surveys, were now around £10bn and a year behind. One survey HS2 Ltd were due to commence just last week involves drilling through an area contaminated by landfill into Londons’ water supply, without having undertaken any risk assessment of the potential environmental consequences.

The response from HS2 Ltd CEO Mark Thurston to the overspend was classic HS2 Ltd, claiming everyone knew the £6.6bn was always a guess, saying: “we always maintained that until we put contractors into play, we would not understand the true cost”, ramping up the spin with “I don’t subscribe to the idea that it is over budget”, preferring the phrase “cost gap” but insisting it “would not be appropriate” to confirm what that “gap” is. The expectation seems to be that contactors should absorb this ‘cost gap’, a dangerous strategy given they can walk partway through these two-part design and build contracts. For crisis-hit Crossrail contractor Kier, who originally won their HS2 bid in a joint venture with Carillion, this may well become their only viable option. One firm has rejected approaches to work as a subcontractor on HS2, with boss John Homer saying the business model is being “squeezed really hard” and “does not appear to work”.

It is maybe worth mentioning at this point that when Grayling first announced that £6.6bn package of contracts, he dismissed suggestions that HS2 could be late or over budget by citing Crossrail as the paragon of procurement probity, stating: “We have a good recent track record in delivering major projects on time and on budget—people have only to look at Crossrail to see that.”

Going back to compensation; with farms, it has become standard practice for HS2 Ltd to “push the limits of its powers” so it can “postpone having to shell out money for the land it will permanently acquire”according to compensation expert Sarah Beer. With businesses the modus operandi of HS2 Ltd is akin to state-ordained theft, simply to not paying out anything at all for as long as they can get away with it. Whilst the practice of delaying compensation payments is illegal, breaking the compensation code as defined by various laws, there is no specified punishment for doing this, hence the changes to the law that came into effect in April. The problem is that the HS2 Phase 1 Act predates these law changes and is therefore exempt from them. However, what HS2 Ltd and individuals within the organisation are not exempt from is the 2006 Fraud Act, Section 4 of which makes it clear that ‘Fraud by abuse of position’ can consist of simply causing someone else to endure a loss by act or omission, especially when your legal duty under the compensation code is specifically to not leave people worse off.

The brazen response strategy was to hold a parliamentary reception to “celebrate the success” of the National High Speed Rail College, after it ‘succeeded’ in defaulting on a loan due to only 96 students enrolling. Though the ‘willing-to-say-absolutely-anything-no-matter-how-clearly-made-up-it-is’ prize goes to Morgan, who once more or less claimed HS2 would end unemployment, by stating “500,000 jobs is just the beginning”.

To ignore such warnings, and think that disaster can be avoided by dispensing with a chair who never warmed up his seat, is to display a psychotic level of denial. The endemic incompetence, unchecked profligacy and continual failure at HS2 Ltd can no longer be dismissed, rebranded or ignored, and hoping the truth about HS2 can be obscured forever behind the Brexit Firewall is simply delusional. With this track record, it can’t be that politicians don’t realise it’s only going to get worse, it can only be that they simply don’t care.

Once again we see big fat lies from big fat cats both in government and HS2 Ltd. For a small island to even consider HS2 was a joke, if it went all the way non stop from London to Inverness it would only save about 30-45 minutes. What are you going to do with that extra time in your life?

Being so far over budget it means that the rail fares are going to be so exorbitant that only the big fat cats will be able to afford to travel by HS2, and most of them have private helicopters that could save a lot more time than HS2. It will mean that HS2 will be running empty therefore loosing even more money.

Surely it would be better to spend the projected £100bn on upgrading the rail service we already have.

They talk about consultation periods, I don’t recall ever being asked for my opinion. Rather than calling it consultation it would be better named insultation period.